


What Delilah Knew

by Anefi



Series: Stiles Stilinski, Psychic Investigator [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Future Fic, Gen, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Peacefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 17:23:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10541079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anefi/pseuds/Anefi
Summary: "Stiles Gets Professional Feedback on his Advertising Materials"“Whatever,” Harley broke in, “Your flyer sucks."





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [kyle wei, tree whisperer](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1412827) by [magneticwave](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magneticwave/pseuds/magneticwave). 



> The way I think of Harley will always and forever owe everything to magneticwave!
> 
> cw in the end notes

The Jeep was in the shop after Stiles had run over something with big spines that got stuck in the undercarriage, so they pulled up to the little house on the older side of town in Derek’s Camaro. It was warm enough for t-shirts and jeans, sunny and beautiful. The front yard was landscaped with flowers and trees, and the back was separated with a high wooden fence.

Their client today answered the doorbell in a sporty tank top, yoga pants, and a soft cloud of natural black curls, completely different from how she’d styled her hair when she and Stiles were in high school. 

“Harley!" he said, and went in for a hug, which she tolerated with a little roll of her eyes but a genuine smile. 

"Stiles," she said, "Thanks for coming."

He beamed at her. "Of _course_." He flapped a hand toward the stubbly shadow behind him on the walkway. "I think you’ve met my partner, Gilderoy Radley.”

“Hi, Derek,” Harley said, sardonic with a faded Southern drawl.

Derek nodded. “Hey.”

A deep bark sounded from inside the house, and Harley grimaced. “You guys want lemonade? Coffee? Shoes off inside.” She pointed at the diverse stack next to the door, turned, and waved at them to join her in the kitchen. Derek placed his boots neatly by the bench, picked up Stiles’s Converse from where he’d left them in the middle of the hall, and lined those up too, before following their voices. Harley had three glasses on the table and was carrying a pitcher from the fridge with lemon slices and muddled green leaves floating on top when another bark, louder, cut off in a whine from down the hall. Harley huffed at the ceiling. “Delilah! Hush!” she called.

“We can check on her first, if you want,” Stiles offered. He might have been aiming for casual and sympathetic, but curiosity was one thing he never could hide.

Harley was torn for a second between deeply-rooted social conditioning and worry, looking from the pitcher to the back of the house. “Alright, might as well. She’s in the sunroom,” she said, and put the pitcher down.

Harley led them down the hall toward a bright converted patio with patterned cement floor and wicker furniture, lined with plants, and stopped in front of a locked set of French doors. A beautiful boxer mix with a marbled brown coat and white chest was pacing anxiously on the other side, whining softly and watching Harley’s every move. “You said on the phone that she’s been acting strange,” Stiles prompted.  Harley opened the door and kneeled in front of her dog, petting her face and shoulders, making shushing noises, and Delilah was immediately pressing close, scenting her, standing between Harley and Stiles and Derek.

“Come on in. If she growls at you, we’ll go back out,” Harley said from the floor, and Derek made brief eye contact with Delilah and projected non-threatening indifference until he could close the door behind Stiles and move out into the room. “She’s five years old, and I’ve never seen her this fussy. She’s always nervous, following me around, and she’s started digging holes in the back yard, which she hasn’t done in years.” She stood up, dusted off her knees, and sat on a wicker armchair with Delilah standing on the floor in front of her to guard. “It’s been a week, but the vet creeps me out, so when I saw your awful flier in the post office I called you first.”

“Hey,” Stiles protested, “my flyer is  _art_ , okay? And obviously  _effective_ , because you called.”

“You spent half an hour in MS Paint and printed in low resolution on paper that looks radioactive,” Derek said. It honestly pained him to look at.

“I'll have you know—” Stiles started.

“Whatever,” Harley broke in. “Your flyer sucks. I just—can you tell me if my dog is okay? Or is she like, sensing something? I need to know if she’s being a normal kind of weird or  _your_  kind of weird.”

Stiles looked shifty. “I have no idea what you—”

“Please,” Harley said derisively, “Since  _sophomore year_ , I’ve been coaching new reporters through maintaining plausible deniability for anyone who doesn’t know this town is a Hellmouth.”

“Hey,” Derek said, “it’s better than it was.” The nemeton was still strong, but less evil.

“Sure. There were only, what, three murders last year?”

“Two of those were unsolved disappearances,” Stiles answered, too quickly. Officially unsolved, maybe, but he’d helped bury those bodies, so.

Harley looked at him for a long moment while Derek studied the ceiling. “Uh-huh,” she said.

Stiles ruefully scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Sorry. We’ll do a sweep.”

Derek walked carefully around the room, identifying plants, looking for scents out of place, and checking through the windows. There were a few bare spots in the back, presumably where Delilah had ripped up the turf and dug holes. He stopped when his circuit brought him back around to Harley, but not too close, mindful of Delilah’s discomfort. “I think she’s okay,” Derek said. “She’s worried about you, that’s all. It’s a pack instinct, you’re her pack, and she’s a smart dog. She’s trying to make sure you’re safe and happy. If you let her hover a little, she should calm down.”

Stiles was standing in the middle of the room with his eyes closed, feeling out the local energy currents. “I’m not sensing any outside influence on her or any kind of hostility that she’d be reacting too, at least,” he said, frowning in concentration. “There could be something transient or mundane that she’s perceiving as a threat, I guess. Actually, the closest thing I’ve seen—you know what it reminds me of? You should have seen Isaac around Erica when she and Boyd—” his eyes flew open. His jaw snapped shut with an audible click. Derek winced. “Ah. Give me a sec, almost done.”

This part of town wasn’t directly on a ley line or in a telluric current, but there was such a concentration here, boosted by the nemeton, that anywhere in the county you could feel the hum of energy under your skin, in your bones, if you knew how to find it. The equivalent of magical background noise made it difficult to pick out the thrum of anything small, like personal crucifixes or lucky coins, but things with enough magical resonance to make a ripple stood out like a stick in a flowing river, eddies tugging around it. Stiles sort of twitched when he felt something, and it led him to wander back into the house, eyes a little glazed. Derek opened the door for him. “That’s not unusual. For him,” he told Harley, who just shook her head.

“I don’t get how he’s both more normal and more weird now,” she said, contemplative.

Derek shrugged. “He’s more himself.” Derek liked it, but he was willing to admit he might be biased.

He let the door to the sun room close and followed Stiles back through the kitchen, past the front door, and into a room they hadn’t seen before; it looked like an office. Stiles tripped on the sill as he tried to turn sharply and Derek caught him by the arm, pulled him back to standing, only for Stiles to crouch in front of a shelf and pick something up. He held it to his face, blew the dust off, and snapped out of his daze. He swayed a little, and Derek braced him by the shoulder as he stood. His hand unfolded to reveal a sprig of holly, finely crafted, green leaves and red berries in colorful enamel, lined with silver somehow untarnished under the dust. Derek ran a careful finger along one pointed leaf. “Silver,” he said, and asked.

“Spelled,” Stiles confirmed. “Luck and protection, and it’s a good one. Old.”

Derek hummed. They went back to the front door, and Stiles found a silver nail still in the wall for the holly to fit above the lintel. He stood for a minute with his fingertips on the holly with his eyes closed, then dug his keychain penknife out of his pocket and reached up to start to carefully scrape paint from the wall. “It’s got runes already,” he said, approving, “I wonder who—” and Derek brought him a chair to stand on. Derek went ahead and poured the lemonade condensing on the table into glasses. He gave one to Stiles when he joined him in the kitchen, and they went back to the sunroom together.

“Leave the holly above the door, it’s a strong protective focus and it’s already tuned to the house,” Stiles said to Harley as he breezed by and collapsed onto a wicker loveseat. A small pile of ratty stuffed animals had accumulated at Harley’s feet in their absence.

Harley looked like she was really, really trying not to roll her eyes. Derek handed her a glass of lemonade. “Sure,” she said, and, “Thanks,” mostly to Derek. Delilah sat up as he got closer to Harley, but her alpha’s calm kept her calm and Derek took his own glass with him to the last chair, where he could kick up his feet beside Stiles’s on the ottoman.

Stiles was poking a bruised leaf stuck to the inside of his glass. “This is not mint,” he said.

“Basil,” Derek said. “It’s good,” he told Harley.

Harley flashed him a smile. “There’s a big lemon tree out back, so I’ve tried about everything. I had strep last month, and I drank like three gallons with blueberries and honey.”

Stiles nodded to himself and absently fiddled with his glass. “You’re still in journalism school, right? I didn’t know you’d be in town. Are they groveling to make you editor of the Chronicle?”

“I got a thing with school so I can get credit and get paid at the same time, so I’m reporting for a bit, then back to junior editor at the end of the quarter. Soon as I graduate, Thibodeaux says he’s ready to put me on the managing desk. Plus,” she grinned, “this is Jay’s place now, his gram moved in with his aunt.”

“Hmm,” Stiles said, “do you have her number? The holly thing is cool.”

“That’s _great_ ,” Derek said pointedly, trying to subtly communicate with his eyebrows at Stiles. “It seems like it’s going well. With him.”

If Harley had been the kind of girl who blushed, she might have blushed. “Yeah,” she said, “We’re both happy. It’s been good.”

“So.” Derek widened his eyes at Stiles, getting desperate. Stiles shook his head minutely but emphatically, with a little shoulder lift that was probably supposed to be encouraging. Derek scowled, betrayed, but forced himself to turn back to Harley and say more words. “So have you and Jay started. Thinking about. Kids.”

There had been an incident the summer after her senior year, back when she was still just writing obituaries for the county paper, where she’d been cornered in the printing room by something fast and hungry that Derek had been tracking through town. She’d showed up at the loft a week later with lemon bars. Since then, they’d been… not really friends, but friendly enough that she was willing to be patient with Derek as he struggled with things like healing a shattered tibia or, more painfully, normal social interaction. “Not yet,” she said, looking at Stiles suspiciously and scratching behind Delilah’s ear. “In a few years, sure, we’ve talked about it, Jay and I both want that.”

“Okay. Well.” Derek cleared his throat. Stiles steepled his hands over his face, like a coward. “So,” he forged on. “Sometimes dogs can be attuned to the people around them. Their. Chemistry.” Harley was staring at him. “So if there are big… changes. In a person’s body. She can tell. So. That’s why she’s feeling protective.”

Harley frowned at him. “I’m pretty sure Stiles wouldn’t be making you practice talking if I had  _cancer_.”

“No!” Stiles burst out, because of course  _now_  he could help. “No, not at all, the opposite. Nothing bad! Probably. Maybe. I guess it’s up to personal interpretation. Though it turns out dogs can also sometimes smell cancer, so you’re not wrong to jump to that conclusion, Derek  _should_  have been  _much more clear_ —”

“You’re pregnant,” Derek said flatly, because Stiles was in no way helping. “It’s very early, you would have noticed in a few weeks, probably.”

Harley stared at them, and at her dog, and back at them, like she expected someone to say it was a joke.

“Mazel tov?” Stiles said, “Or I can take it back and extend condolences, I don’t want to pressure you.”

“I’m on the  _pill_ ,” Harley protested.

“Antibiotics when you had strep,” Stiles said. “That was probably it. Sorry. Lydia can rant for hours about how bad the state of studies is looking into how other prescriptions interact with hormonal birth control.”

Delilah shoved her face in Harley’s lap and blinked up at her with soulful brown eyes. “Christ on a bike.” Harley said faintly. “I should write an article.” She put her hands on either side of Delilah’s muzzle and shook gently. “And you. Are you digging  _dens_  in the yard? Not good. No.” Delilah looked proud, and licked Hayley’s fingers.

“At least she’s not bringing you dead rabbits to eat,” Stiles said. They all looked at the pile of abused stuffed animals on the floor.

“She’s doing her best,” Derek said.

“Oh my god, of course you’re defending her.” Stiles kicked the side of Derek’s foot. “This idiot brought home half a cow when we found out Erica was pregnant, and he offered her and Boyd a  _house_.”

Harley shook her head. “You should at least _try_ not to look like a cult, seriously.”

“We ate it all,” Derek mumbled. “and it’s good having them in the building, but I wanted them to have the option.”

“You’re babysitting again tomorrow,” Stiles reminded him.

Derek grimaced. “It’s  _good_ ,” he reminded himself.

Harley rubbed her face with her hand and sighed. “Alright. I guess I’m okay with hearing it from you, and I can stop worrying about my dog, and I’ll trust you about the holly thing. Stiles, I know you’d have come over anyway, but my Nana warned me about favors. So. Open access to the unpublished archives of the paper, twenty-four hours total, you leave when I go home.” Stiles rubbed his hands together and looked like he wanted to cackle. “If there’s any other woo-woo protection whatever you can do for a baby, I’ll listen. Derek…” she considered. “You want a box of lemons?”

He did, but. “If we need to… if it would be important for people to be warned about something, or to have a semi-official explanation for something, and we can’t make it come from the police, could we talk to you about putting something in the paper?”

“Nice and specific,” she complained. “Ugh. I’d do that anyway. Take some lemons.”

**Author's Note:**

> content warning: super brief cancer mention, some discussion of pregnancy.
> 
> life warning: antibiotics will mess you up, no joke; be safe
> 
>  
> 
> Let me know what you think of the story and the series; I know this one's not too exciting, but it popped into my head while I couldn't sleep and sometimes it's nice for nothing bad to happen. Also, any chance I have to get more people to read about Harley saving the newspaper and Kyle Wei's tree girlfriend is a chance I have to take. :D


End file.
